This is nothing new. There are sections of any major city and a lot of dying small towns where the economy is driven by government handouts. In the old days, these people would have moved or found other work. Now a lot of them are content to sit around watching cable TV and surfing the internet until the next government check comes in. And that’s no joke — from what I’ve seen, a lot of these people literally are happy sitting around watching TV, week after week, until the next check comes in. They exist and do nothing productive with their lives.
I don’t live in a particularly depressed area, but it is a rare event if I go to the grocery store and am not preceded by, or followed by, someone in the checkout line paying with an EBT card.
In most cities, this section includes a street named "Martin Luther King" and another named "Cesar Chavez".